The United Nation Development Programme (UNDP) on Sustainable Development Goals aims “to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity”. Extreme hunger and malnutrition remain a huge barrier to development in many countries. According to UN estimates, there are 821 million people estimated to be chronically undernourished as of 2017, often as a direct consequence of environmental degradation, drought, and biodiversity loss. This warrants a focus on different approaches to meet the challenges of hidden hunger as well as food and nutritional security.

Among these approaches, the utilization of wild vegetables is a promising option. These plants are a rich source of vitamins and several essential minerals, they are tolerant to adverse environmental conditions, and they can be grown at a low cost. Despite that, the utilization of wild vegetables is restricted to rural areas. Rural communities are rich in these resources, but they remained underutilized because of a lack of awareness and technological investment. Domestication of wild vegetables and future research into them could help with the establishment of sustainable agriculture, the advancement of food security, and the economic development of rural areas.

This Research Topic aims to explore the potential of wild vegetables from many different areas of research. The success of this Research Topic will provide future direction for bioprospecting and utilizing wild vegetables.

We invite authors to submit manuscripts on themes that include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Bioprospecting of wild vegetables;
• Nutritional and functional evaluation of wild vegetables;
• Wild vegetables for alleviating human dietary deficiencies;
• Domestication of wild vegetables for sustainable agriculture;
• Development of value-added products from wild vegetables;
• Omics approaches to improve agriculture application of wild vegetables;
• Climate resilience in wild vegetables;
• Genetic diversity in wild vegetables.

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Frontiers in Plant Science

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Impact